> They want to ensure that games are of high quality so as to not hurt the reputation of the platform itself. They want games to help sell consoles. And that's how video game consoles always worked.
And my argument is that an overall better (according to each individual buyer's preference) software experience is a major (perhaps the single largest) differentiator of iPhones over competing smartphones. This has always been a major part of Apple's marketing and indeed is the primary reason I use an iPhone. Yes, on the iPhone it's "games and other apps" instead of just games, but I don't see that being a major difference (particularly since game consoles can serve other purposes too, like media consumption and home automation).
My argument is that iPhones are and have always been essentially "the game console of smartphones" or "the appliance of smartphones." In fact, that type of description is often used both pejoratively by iPhone haters and lovingly by iPhone fans. They're simply not made for or marketed to people who want a general-purpose Unix PC with a cell phone antenna built in, even though technically they are essentially that (note, of course, that iPhones and game consoles are technically general purpose computers, but that's not really relevant).
> They're general-purpose devices at this point — both by design and by how Apple markets them. The problem is, both developers and users see the app store and its policies as a nuisance.
I strongly disagree with your impression here. My impression has been that complaints about App Store rules have overwhelmingly come from a small number of extremely large developers (unsurprisingly, developers that are big enough that they want to make a play to shift some of Apple's market power toward themselves). I don't see iPhone owners complaining about App Store rules, and I suspect one reason is that anyone who values being able to sideload any software on their smartphone has many very nice Android options.